Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 Read Free Page A

green-grey water from the blue-grey sky. The sails were already unstrung, alive in the snapping breeze. The berthing oars were out. Three pairs swept down either side of the wide beam, making of the Blue Mackerel a beetle, stalking into dock. A string of seagulls swayed over her wake.
    She could have been any one of the sleek merchant sloops that flitted back and forth across the narrow stretch of sea from Britain to the small, crowded harbour at Coriallum on the northern coast of Gaul, but for the discreet purple pennant flying from the foremast that said she sailed on the emperor’s business.
    At any other time, that might have been a lie contrived to increase the fares charged for passage, but not when Nero had honoured Coriallum with his presence for the chariot races, and was in temporary residence in the magistrate’s villa at the top of the hill.
    As ever, the harbour was heaving with men, women, children, dogs and gulls, all watching the Mackerel come in. The furled dockside stench of old fish, fresh dog shit, rotting vegetables and seaweed was buried beneath the sweat of a hundred busy bodies.
    Stevedores and fishermen leaned in pairs on bollards, picking their teeth, discussing the swell of the sea and the sharp iron taste of the air. Women balanced on either hip baskets of bread and dried figs and dried seaweed that blended their scents with the richer, rounder scent of the fresh wrack that hung from pillars beneath the pier. Old men coiled ropes and mended nets, bare-headed in the blustering wind. Half-naked children played games of tag, dodging round the legs of their elders.
    A grubby urchin fishing from the pier’s end watched the adults covertly from the shelter of a wide-brimmed straw hat. As he did every day, he assessed the size and weight of their belt-pouches by sound alone, and then checked to see whether those of interest were armed, and what kinds of looks they threw him there at the pier’s end, if they chose to notice him at all. The boy-whores of Coriallum were notorious, but not everyone wished to be seen to be looking.
    The boy’s name was Math, common enough amongst the Gauls. He paid the Mackerel no attention at all until the wake from her arrival slewed the mess of flotsam and jetsam floating up against the pier, upsetting the lie of his line. Then, he cursed, loudly enough to be heard, drew up his cord, set fresh collops of mussel on the half-dozen hooks and dropped it back into the water with a splash.
    Tying it off, he leaned sideways against a mooring stone. Tilting his hat against the low afternoon sun, he allowed himself a lazy look at the men who had bought, or been given, passage on the emperor’s ship.
    The first six ashore were Romans, green-faced and swaying on their sea legs, more bookish than bred to the sea. Ink stains on their fingers and the level cut of their hair gave them away as clerks in the governor’s retinue, sent with the endless quartermaster’s lists, of weapons, corn, hides, horses, men, hounds and slaves, and most particularly of the taxes with which Roman officialdom was obsessed.
    Math felt the quality of their glances as they passed. On any other day, he might have considered making a play, but the clerks smelled of vomit and were clearly too ill to think of anything beyond an unswaying bed. None of them threw him a coin to pay for an ‘evening meal’.
    To make sure they wouldn’t think of it, he squirmed his buttocks on the boards of the pier as if his arse itched, and then scratched urgently at his groin.
    Ajax the charioteer had taught him that when they had first talked. There are men who will take you and not pay, however fast you might be with a knife. But if they think you’re infected, they’ll not come within an arm’s reach .
    Ajax wanted him to be a race-driver, or at least to earn an honest living. The advice on simulating the pox had been given reluctantly, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good. When Math turned back to look, the